I can actually understand the reasons for not including thermal paste. They'd need to include quite a lot for a start but also the number of possible remountings to get it all working correctly might leave them having to include loads. It's really wasteful for everything you buy to come with thermal paste so I would rather heatsink manufacturers gave up supplying it and everyone had to buy their own separately. This would not only be more economic but also much more ecologically sound. I have loads of token sized thermal paste tubes left over from heatsinks over the years!

I would like to see someone make one of these cases out of copper instead of Al. I assume it would add somewhat to the costs but it would like very cool and should have better thermal properties.

Copper eavestroughs are popular on some high end homes in Toronto so if people are willing to use copper for this purpose then why not for a very small PC case?

There is a gain in thermal conductivity with copper, but aluminum would work fine, I don't think the raw material is a critical bottleneck with these heatsink cases. Maybe the clamp portions could be copper, but the fins really don;t need to be. It's in the precision of the joins (or breaks) in the thermal path, the quality of the heatpipes, and overall execution. Simply put, there are too many losses in the heat path, and if these losses were minimized, we'd see better thermal performance. Achieving this would require higher precision in design & manufacture, probably larger, heavier parts. Check out the cooling parts used in the Zalman TNN cases (check through our old case reviews); those were very serious, and they cost a bundle. Ditto A-Tech Fabrication's products -- very heavy duty, much more precise, and many times more expensive.

For example...1) The clamps that secure the heatpipe ends to the heatsink and to the CPU both have to have some degree of loose play. This is unavoidable in a system designed for use with various different types of components, and unlike in a conventional heatsink, the pipes cannot be soldered. But there's no question it could be better than in the Streacom.2) The amount of pressure brought to bear on these critical joins could definitely be higher. This would take better machining, heftier parts.3) The heatpipes are too tightly bent. Engineering specs detail things like the minimum radius of any bends in a heatpipes to keep thermal loss to a minimum, and also correct machine bending to ensure that the pipe retains its shape through the bend. I don't have full details on these particular heatpipes, but they definitely look too tightly bent, and they are probably bent by hand, with some deformation of the pipes.

Add those things up and you might see 5 deg C or more losses altogether. The Streacom is built to a price, and it shows. But it's good enough for the vast majority of systems for the way they will be used. No one will put a 95W CPU in there and run Prime95 in it. Or run P95 in any system except geeks who just have to know and reviewers. For real world use, it's good enough... and that is the point of these cases.

Have a look at the details of the atech fabrication 2800HP case and then look at the pricing. You'll see that the heatsink has lots of copper, and is obvious high precision, beautifully machined with hefty parts capable of high tension -- but it alone (without case or anything else) is priced as much as the entire Streacom. In fact go through the exercise of ordering a case. With minimal options (2 HDDs, CPU heatsinks, no chipset heatsink), my order got up to $859.

Thanks for that MikeC, that's exactly the info I needed. I'd also looked at the bends in those heatpipes and wondered about the quality overall. Given this, why wasn't the article more critical?

I'd also just looked at the ATech 2800HP as it's the only fanless system out there that fits my spec... but I can't run to that price.

Why not more critical? Well, it clearly failed the P95 test with a 65W TDP CPU, which is damning all by itself, and yet, as I mentioned, that by itself still does not make the product not useful. Because the product is built to a price for a purpose to meet a market demand -- and in these matters, it succeeds.

As the A-tech contrast shows clearly, improving performance (how much?) does entail a significant rise in cost. The demand for a £104 (~US$163) fanless media case that looks decent, has the right balance of features and cools just well enough is probably anywhere between 3 to 10 times higher than for a $860 fanless media case that looks nicer and does everything better.

Having said that, yeah, I think Streacom could study Atech and incorporate some changes into their own products to improve performance without too much increase in cost... but if any of these require capital investment in better machining tools, etc, then it just might not be seen to be necessary or cost-effective.

Regarding the clearance issues with the SATA ports, some boards are better than others for this case I suppose. Also important is the location of the main PSU connector since there needs to be room for the PicoPSU sticking up. I found this ASRock Z77E-ITX board and it appears to be of a configuration well-suited for this case.

Dear gazer365My latest build consists of the Gigabyte Z87N-WiFi using the Streacom FC8 Evo. I had to bend one of the heatpipes ever so slightly in order for all four heatpipes to fit. It's quite a snug fit over the psu but it wasn't any real issue - the real problem is running out of hands when trying to fit the heatpipes

But it all works and the system is -very- fast. Here's a rundown of the entire hardware in my build:

I have the same problem with the socket being too close to the case. It's out by quite a bit and the pipes are too long. I have the B85 ITX with an FC8 Evo and am gutted that I can't swap the mobo out this weekend!

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